Perhaps in anger over Newt and Callista taking a two-week cruise in the Aegean Sea after the worst campaign launch in modern American history, the senior staff of the Gingrich campaign for president has quit en masse.

It is hard to read the tea leaves sometimes, but when a major Republican crosses his party on Ryancare, then his campaign staff quit, well that is not that tough to read.

Once again polling shows that the inside-the-beltway crowd is completely out of step with what large majorities of the public wants. What the people want are progressive policies. How would have thought?

On June 11, three months will have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. This is a good time for an update on the current status of the Fukushima One nuclear power station. In this post, I will focus on key technical details, and try to cover the impacts on people separately on another day.

When Willard let it slip last week that he agrees with 90% of the world’s climate scientists about global warming, I was wondering how long it would take before the Two Minutes of Hate would commence.

Well, it’s arrived.

Apparently, the government is scrambling in the Thomas Drake NSA whistleblower case.

According to Ellen Nakashima, they offered him two plea bargains yesterday, both involving no jail time. He rejected both.

Raj Date, who has already been hired to work as associate director of research, markets and regulations for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is being eyed for a promotion to director, according to multiple reports today. Date would have to agree to leapfrog his close colleague, Elizabeth Warren, and take the job. Other candidates have been reluctant to do this.

More Americans say that the cost of war has contributed a “great deal” to the deficit (60%), as opposed to those who say the same about domestic spending (24%) in a recent Pew poll.

According the a new CBS News poll only 30 percent of the country believe we are doing the right thing in Libya while 59 percent believe we shouldn’t have been involved.

David House, the friend of Bradley Manning’s who has been repeatedly harassed by the government because of his support for Manning, has been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Alexandria on Wednesday, June 15 (PDF: Letter, Directions, subpoena).

According to people familiar with the Grand Jury’s proceedings, the Department of Justice prosecutor in charge of the case is Tracy McCormick of the Eastern District of Virginia, whose background is in prosecuting child molester cases. This likely due to the fact that such cases usually involve computer forensics, and gives an indication that the government’s case against Manning will likely come down to what they can find on Manning’s hard drive.